The Establishment pooh-poohs them as having not really been anything substantial - protesters of comfort and convenience.

Spring comes late.

OWS is forgotten.

With warmth, OWS returns... M-A-S-S-I-V-E-L-Y.

The Establishment is caught even more off guard than they were with the pre-Winter movement.

It grows, summer burns, and the elections of '12 are dominated by it to the same degree that the election of '10 was dominated by the Tea Party.

Sure glad all my albums went GOLD."Ferdy-bee-bee-dee-ferbs."Subscribe & Earn Karma Miles with Every Visit!Rule #5 Professional Exemption.Blind Follower, Just Think Positive Hyperinflation, I Get Paid 500 Quadrillion Dollars/Hour at 1000% Interest/Hour Compounding Forever Each Mouse Click Religion."I too observe 'flation.'"I love you, TASR!YOU MAKE KITTY SCAREDTops Take TimePostulate A Free Lunch EconomyAnyone, now, who is not genuinely afraid is a moran.[T]housands of empty stucco crapboxes vacated after being circle-jerk sham-traded among corrupt borkers, uppraisers and loan officers from 100K up to 800K, then "nopay-walkaway" (with dirty loan cash in pockets)Guess again, girlfriend.Or, $2.7 million every effing day since the effing pinball machine.Permabear Hysterian

"The robot, trading algorithms that trade 24 hours around the clock had quite a week. All of the U.S. stock market gain last week occurred on overnight gaps in reaction to the news out of Europe and, to a lesser extent, China.

"I have noticed for some years now that front-running the U.S. open increasingly is a winning way to game the market. That and high-frequency trading algorithms that can read, interpret, and react to momentum, price anomalies, and news in a millisecond or two--well before humans can perceive that something just happened. Now if we only had a multimillion dollar trading infrastructure to take advantage of this insight...

"A graph of cumulative close minus open prices for the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY: 128.60) is actually lower now than it was a week ago. That implies net selling pressure during the regular New York trading session from 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. (The SPX cash index does not offer a true open price, so we cannot use it for any indicators that depend on an accurate open price.) If a day trader bought on the open and sold on the close each day, he would have lost money."

i live on east 93rd street in nyc. so it is very convenient for me to go downtown and participate whenever i feel like it. i first went to zuccoti the second day of the action, six weeks ago. so i could see for myself what was going on.

over the next three weeks, i stopped by two or three more times, chatting with people for an hour or three each time. then, the protest came to me.

there was an action when about 300 people, a lot of them union types (city employees, hospital workers, teachers) marched through the upper east side, stopping four times in front of the buildings where four billionaires live (or at least owned homes). rupert murdoch was one of these targets, two others i don't remember. but the fourth was jamie dimon. and, unbeknownst to me, he lives across the street from me. so, i came home from work one day (around 3pm) to this crowd of protesters, news reporters and about 40 cops on the street, with more reinforcements inside of dimon's building.

i just can't get over my proximity to one of the biggest pigmen slimeballs on earth. my building, half a block off park avenue, is miles away from his in value. there are a couple of schoolteachers, a nurse, and several young couples with one or two children; some live in rent-controlled apartments as well as the market rate renters ($3500 for a big 2-bedroom). that's new york, the super rich adjacent to the modestly affluent, with some middle class sprinkled in. and spanish harlem starts only four blocks north.

anyway, i have followed this action closely in person, and when not participating. i've avoided the most volatile days, the biggest actions that resulted in arrests and police rough stuff. i am most impressed by the reactions of people to the protests; how uninformed, how inaccurate, how strongly such ignorant and wrong opinions and analyses are voiced and clung hard to. (and that's just the news media!) also how peoples' reactions have changed over such a brief time. and how police reaction has been such potent fuel for increasing first media attention, then increasing participation all across the country.

the number of people who have attended a single protest site or action, even as a spectator, at over a hundred locations all across the country, is miniscule. even compared to the number of people who watch bill o'reilly or rachael maddow on tv a single evening. this could all go away and be forgotten as quickly as it sprung up. it could be the seed of a revolutionary change, over a short or long period of time. or likely something in between those extremes.

i am 55yo. what i was too young to appreciate or remember about the 60s and 70s, i spent a lot of time learning about in college (UC Santa Barbara) and subsequently. this seems very different. i am a fan of the strauss-howe/fourth turning/generational dynamics ideas of viewing history and current events. i find these ideas useful in thinking about the OWS actions, and budding 'movement'

About Fox News, maybe some people believe faux news, but I think most people with a working brain will counter react the unbalanced and unfair reporting.
It's like the police action, the more you beat up and pepper spray people (looked like 60's footage, even the cops had that dumbed up beer belly swine look like back then!) the more people join in protest all over the US and the World! The more they push the more it will snap-back against them.

Faux News in unbelievable, I don't know what Jon Stewart's the daily show would do without them

Regarding OWS's objectives, ending tax havens should be one of them. It would reduce not only tax evasion but also corruption if they really end tax havens for everyone - including politicians. Efforts by the EU (including the latest Sarkozy BS) and US so far only seem to target people below the top 1%. They don't want the middle class and lower/mid upper class to evade taxes, while the top 1% continue to.

"Just weeks ago, in our first memo, we expressed concern that the big Wall Street banks were vulnerable to a mass financial boycott -- more vulnerable even than tobacco companies or apartheid-era South African multinationals. A boycott might raise fears of a bank run; and the fears might create the fact. "

"The Lower 99’s notion of an attack on Wall Street is to stand around hollering at the New York Stock Exchange. The stock exchange! "

Regarding OWS's objectives, ending tax havens should be one of them. It would reduce not only tax evasion but also corruption if they really end tax havens for everyone - including politicians. Efforts by the EU (including the latest Sarkozy BS) and US so far only seem to target people below the top 1%. They don't want the middle class and lower/mid upper class to evade taxes, while the top 1% continue to.

I've got some shocking news for you. The current socialist government wants everybody's money, including the 1% that you so envy and despise. Don't forget, but since the collapse of 08', the Federal Government is making it harder for foreign banks to hide assets of wealthy U.S. citizens. Remember when the Swiss were forced to give up account information of some of their wealthy U.S. clients in recent years? This trend is continuing. FACTA - this law threatens foreign financial banks and financial institutions of all kinds with a 30% withholding tax if they fail to comply with an onerous reporting regime on their U.S. clients.

Now, I am not condoning tax evasion, but your claims that the wealthy 1% are exempt from the blood sucking tentacles of the U.S. government are not exactly true as you state. Like you did mention, I think the only people that are exempt from these actions are the politicians themselves and those that support them. The current marxist democrat regime is playing the class warefare card -OWS is an extension of this - by trying to demonize the rich to get more votes and power. However, even if they did confiscate the wealth of the entire 1%, it wouldn't help much because federal government spending is so insanely out of control. Besides, would any of this help the lower middle class and poor? I don't think so. Taxing the piss out of the rich would, in reality, only further hurt the poor and lower middle class. Hey, but it would make Karl Marx and his devout followers proud.

I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream; that's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor... and surviving

A recent article of the U.S. going after 100 very wealthy members of the 1%:

"NEW YORK (AP) -- The U.S. Justice Department called Switzerland's largest private bank a fugitive from justice on Friday after it didn't send any representatives to a court hearing in New York, where it has been charged with conspired with American clients to hide $1.2 billion from the Internal Revenue Service.

Wegelin & Co. is accused of helping at least 100 U.S. clients conceal huge sums of money from the IRS in overseas accounts."

I've got some shocking news for you. The current socialist government wants everybody's money, including the 1% that you so envy and despise. Don't forget, but since the collapse of 08', the Federal Government is making it harder for foreign banks to hide assets of wealthy U.S. citizens. Remember when the Swiss were forced to give up account information of some of their wealthy U.S. clients in recent years? This trend is continuing. FACTA - this law threatens foreign financial banks and financial institutions of all kinds with a 30% withholding tax if they fail to comply with an onerous reporting regime on their U.S. clients.

Now, I am not condoning tax evasion, but your claims that the wealthy 1% are exempt from the blood sucking tentacles of the U.S. government are not exactly true as you state. Like you did mention, I think the only people that are exempt from these actions are the politicians themselves and those that support them. The current marxist democrat regime is playing the class warefare card -OWS is an extension of this - by trying to demonize the rich to get more votes and power. However, even if they did confiscate the wealth of the entire 1%, it wouldn't help much because federal government spending is so insanely out of control. Besides, would any of this help the lower middle class and poor? I don't think so. Taxing the piss out of the rich would, in reality, only further hurt the poor and lower middle class. Hey, but it would make Karl Marx and his devout followers proud.

I have no reason to envy or despise the top 1% that got into the club fair and square or through a windfall gain. I do not envy those that got there by stealing and/or cheating on their taxes, although I reserve the right to despise them I think "demonizing the rich" is the counter-information campaign against OWS. I don't blame the counter-informationists for this lousy argument, It's just hard to come up with a good counter-information campaign when you're fighting a fragmented group with no clear leader. It's usually much more effective to just go after the leader and make a full frontal assault on his character.

Problem is the roots of government overspending are in corruption. Big time corruption. The kind that gets paid through accounts no one can investigate.